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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

When EMRs are the gossip of the week at TechCrunch (a popular tech startup website), you know our little EMR thang has gone mainstream. And TechCrunch is indeed one of a series of sites trumpeting the news of a design challenge intended to make the Continuity of Care Document more usable.

The White House’s Health Design Challenge, working with a community of philanthropic angels and mentors known as Designer Fund, asks designers to transform the CCD (and by extension the Blue Button output) from a consumer-hostile mess into something easily used by the following groups:

An underserved inner-city parent with lower health literacy

A senior citizen that has a hard time reading

A young adult who is engaged with technology and mobile devices

An adult whose first language is not English

A patient with breast cancer receiving care from multiple providers

A busy mom managing her kids’ health and helping her aging parents

The ONC and VA, which seem to be spearheading the effort, are providing for twelve winners. First place for best overall design gets $16K, second place $6K and third place $4K. They’re also distributing $8K per category across winners for best medical/problem history section, best medication section and best lab summaries.

The design is expected to not only improve the visual layout of the record, it’s also supposed to make it easier for a patient to manage their health, enable medical professionals to digest information more efficiently and help caregivers support patients. Tall order for a messed-up text file? Well, we’ll see what design superbrains can do.

In part because the VA hopes to use the new designs to support its Blue Button initiative and its MyHealtheVet patient portal, all entries have to be submitted under a Creative Commons license. Curators will select a final design — which may include elements from various winning entries — and open source the code on code-sharing commuity Github.